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Many CenturyLink customers across the U.S. lost internet service Thursday amid a lengthy outage that even affected some Verizon customers.

The outage began early in the day but by late Thursday night, the company tweeted that its engineers had identified a "network element" that was affecting services and expected to fully restore services within hours.

CenturyLink said early Friday morning it was still working on full restoration of service.

"We're seeing positive progress with our service restoration efforts and our recovery plan is being accelerated as much as possible," the company said.

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Monroe, Louisiana-based CenturyLink didn't provide details of the problem and it didn't indicate how many customers were affected. Customers from New York to California reported outages.

Jessica Rosenworcel, a member of the Federal Communications Commission, said via Twitter it was a nationwide outage and her agency needed to investigate.

On Friday, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced the agency was investigating.

"When an emergency strikes, its critical that Americans are able to use 911 to reach those who can help. The CenturyLink service outage is therefore completely unacceptable, and its breadth and duration are particularly troubling," Pai said in a statement.

The outage knocked out 911 emergency call services in parts of western Washington state. KOMO reports that some CenturyLink customers reported receiving busy signals when dialing 911. Other areas of the country also experiencing 911 outages included parts of Missouri, Idaho and Arizona.

In Idaho, the internet problems caused the temporary shutdown of phone services at the Idaho Department of Correction and the state's Department of Education, The Idaho Statesman reported.

At North Colorado Medical Center in Greeley, Colorado, doctors and nurses for a time had difficulty accessing patient records. Rather than using digital devices, they had to take notes with pencil and paper, according to the Greeley Tribune .

WyoLotto officials said they would postpone announcing Wyoming's winning state lottery numbers and winnings for the day until after the outage was over.

Verizon said it had service interruptions in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and parts of Montana as a result of issues with CenturyLink. Verizon said CenturyLink helps handle wireless network data traffic for Verizon and other wireless providers.